“He lifted up a blanket that was by the fireplace, and he held up a leg,” Scott said. “I could see a leg and a sock and a shoe. . . . That’s when he said that the black plastic was a body, too. . . . Then he kicked the black plastic bag. . . . He kicked it hard.”
“What was going through your mind at this time?”
“I just thought I was going to die because I didn’t understand why he would show me what he did and then let me live,” Scott said matter-of-factly. Her courage on the stand had spectators shaking their heads in admiration, but there was more . . . and it only got worse.
Scott recalled how Neal warned her of “the others” upstairs and then left her covered with a blanket, thinking of the horror surrounding her, not daring to move. When he returned, she could hear him whispering with another person, who was seated and bound to the chair that she’d seen at the foot of the bed. “He asked, ‘So how’s your day going so far?’ ” She recognized the voice of the woman who answered as belonging to Angela Fite.
When he lifted the blanket, “I think it really took Angie by surprise. She just looked at me, and she shook her head, and she said, ‘I’m sorry.’ . . . Then she said, ‘We’re not going to get out of here alive, are we?’ ”
Neal seemed to be in no hurry. After allowing Fite to have a cigarette, he retaped Scott’s mouth.
“Tight enough to hurt?” Tingle asked.
“It was uncomfortable, yes,” she replied. “And so then he said he was going to get a treat for his cat.” He disappeared from her sight for a moment before reappearing behind Angela with the maul half-raised. “Then I saw him hit Angie,” Scott recalled, sobbing. Her family, Angela Fite’s family, Candace Walters’s daughter, Rebecca Holberton’s sister, Beth, and other friends cried as well.
Then, as if he’d finished some chore, Neal calmly walked away. When he returned, he stooped to pick up the cigarette that had popped out of Angie’s mouth.
Scott recalled how she could hear Angela’s blood striking the wood floor . . . not one drop at a time but “like water pouring from a pan.” Neal got up and placed a blanket under Angie’s head—“so you don’t have to hear that.”
Fite had been saying things that she wasn’t supposed to, he explained. That’s why he’d done what he had to do. “You see how calm and smooth I am,” he boasted. “Bet you didn’t know that was coming.”
Scott told the judges how she had been forced to kneel next to Angela Fite’s body and perform oral sex. In his seat at the defense table, Neal shook his head as though in disbelief.
“He was holding the gun to my head, and I asked him if I was going to die,” Scott said, crying. “He asked if I wanted to die. I said no.”
“How was he holding the gun to your head?” Tingle asked.
Scott lifted her left hand and pointed it like a gun to her temple. “Like right here,” she said.
“Could you see that gun?”
“No.”
“Could you feel it?”
“Yes, I could feel it.”
Scott cried quietly and Tingle allowed her a minute before asking her to describe the rest of the rape and then the long night of terror. Spectators shook their heads at the courage that she’d shown by asking him to sit on the mattress and hold her hand. “I just wanted to have him next to me so that I knew that he couldn’t sneak up on me,” Scott explained. “He sat with me all the rest of the time that we were there.”
“All night long?” Tingle asked, though he knew the answer.
“Yes.”
“Did you hold his hand?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you do that, Suzanne?”
Her answer poured from her like water through a shattered dam. “So that if I fell asleep, that I would feel him move his hand so that I could wake up, and I would see what he was doing so he couldn’t sneak up on me like he snuck up on Angie.”
The rest of the afternoon passed as Scott recounted each event in detail. “Do you have words that you could use to describe your mental state during this, Suzanne?” Tingle asked.
She hesitated, then said, “I kept expecting . . . I kept thinking that Angela was going to move. I kept thinking that person that I saw, they were going to move. I just kept thinking that somehow this wasn’t true.” The image of Angela Fite’s feet and hands still taped to the chair stuck in her mind. “I still see that a lot. . . . I think I memorized exactly how it looked when I left.”
Scott wasn’t sure how long she and Beth Weeks were forced to sit and listen to Neal recount his rampage into the tape recorder. When at last she was allowed to go to her bedroom, she shut the door and turned on the television, hoping to go to sleep. That next morning, she said, she tried to stay in bed as long as possible “so I wouldn’t have to go out into the living room.”
When Neal warned them not to try to get help and left them alone, she said, they both “just kind of wandered around our apartment aimlessly.”
“What was going through your mind about those threats?” Tingle asked.
“Just that he meant it,” she replied. “I didn’t think that he would hesitate at all to hurt me or to hurt Beth. It just seemed like whatever we could think of to do to get help, wouldn’t work . . . wouldn’t work good enough or fast enough.”
Scott recalled how David Cain came into the picture—choosing to stay with the women rather than ensuring his own safety. When Neal left and the police arrived, “Beth and I were basically hysterical . . . and I don’t know that we were making sense to anybody. Dave was still on the phone, and so it was very chaotic when they first got there.”
Scott’s testimony was nearly over. She’d done better than Tingle could have ever imagined from someone who had been through so much at such a young age, at any age. She’d recounted as horrible a story as any he’d encountered in fifteen years as a prosecutor, sitting just a few feet from the man whose face haunted her waking hours as well as her sleep. It had not taken much prodding; neither was Scott weepy, afraid to speak. Yes, she
had
cried, but at the right moments, when anything less wouldn’t have seemed natural.
It was time to let her go and hope that someday she could put it behind her. Never forgotten, but less immediate. There was just one more image he wanted to leave the judges with. He asked her about the afternoon after the murder of Angela Fite when Neal insisted that they drive back to West Chenango Drive.
“We had gone by it and he said we may have to go back inside just this once,” she recalled. “I just begged him again and asked if he would please not make me go back into that house.”
“Can you tell us what was going through your mind?”
“It was scary,” she replied. “There wasn’t anybody there. The police weren’t there at that time and I was very afraid that I was going to have to go back inside, and I didn’t want to see what was inside again. . . . I was afraid if I went back inside that I wouldn’t come back out.”
As Scott spoke, Tingle shuffled through his photographs. Finding the one that he sought, he placed it on the overhead projector so that it would appear on the television monitors around the courtroom. The image of a beautiful, smiling young woman appeared.
“Who is that?” Tingle asked.
A cloud passed over Scott’s face. “That’s Angie,” she answered softly.
Tingle told the court that he had no more questions. Scott began to move as though to get down from the witness stand, but froze when Judge Woodford asked Neal if he wanted to cross-examine her. Up to this point, she had not looked at Neal, but if he questioned her, she would have to; she didn’t turn to see his response.
“Your Honor, I do not,” Neal said.
With that, Scott was excused. She stepped down from the stand, her head up and eyes on her mother as she moved past Neal.
The court was adjourned for the day. The spectators, many of them still in tears and sniffling, filed out quietly. The family and friends of the victims were gathered at the elevators to leave when someone noticed that Beth Weeks wasn’t with them. There was a moment of panic. . . . There was no evil that they would put beyond Neal’s capabilities. But she was in the hallway, sobbing as a victim’s advocate placed an arm around her shoulders.
“It was my fault,” Beth moaned. “It was all my fault.”
Eighteen
September 22, 1999
The next day, Beth Weeks got her chance to testify against her onetime lover, the romantic, exciting, mysterious millionaire who was going to buy a home for her and her children. He had seemed like “the same old Cody,” she recalled, when he picked her and Suzanne Scott up on the evening of July 3, just a few hours after hacking Candace Walters to death.
He proposed to her, she said, a joke. Of that she was sure. He’d then lived up to his reputation, spending money freely by taking his dates to a strip bar for dinner and a dance. Then later, holding court at The Stampede, instructing the young men how to treat a lady.
A few days later, when he sat in her kitchen and explained what he had done to the three murder victims and her roommate, “it was like he was proud,” she said, breaking into tears and sobs. “I screamed at him. . . . He put a gun to my head and asked if I wanted to die.”
Then he’d made her sit there with him as he taped his confession, a nightmare that “went on and on and on until the sun came up,” she recalled. “He said he had killed Angie because she had lied to him and was going back to her husband.”
When he gave her, Suzanne Scott, and David Cain instructions on what to do after he left them, he warned that he was a hit man for the mob and would kill them all if they deviated from his plan. She’d believed him.
Most of the rest of the day was occupied with testimony from criminalists who described the meaning of various pieces of evidence, such as the blood-spatter analysis.
The fourth day of the hearing was devoted to the videotaped interview that Neal gave Aceves and investigator Cheryl Zimmerman on September 14, 1998. When told it would last eight hours, Judge Woodford asked if an excerpted version could be played instead, but Bachmeyer insisted that the panel hear the full tape. The prosecution team didn’t want any defense attorneys coming along later and claiming that an excerpted tape made Neal look worse than he was and using it as the basis for an appeal.
A former National Park Service ranger and seven-year veteran of the district attorney’s office, the forty-one-year-old Bachmeyer had spent the past couple of years before this case working domestic violence cases. It bothered her that given the outlandish stories that Neal had fed to his victims, they would come across to the public as witless and gullible . . . as having gone almost willingly to the slaughter like sheep.
She knew the victims were not stupid. They were all intelligent, caring women. They did not engage in lifestyles that put them at risk: they didn’t hang out with gangs; they weren’t prostitutes or drug addicts; they didn’t go out with strangers. Neal was no stranger to these women; he was their friend, confidant, and lover.
But they were vulnerable in one way or another to a sweet-talking con man—maybe they were in a bad relationship or just getting out of one . . . or struggling to make ends meet . . . or simply lonely. Then along came Wild Bill Cody, in his cowboy hat and boots, with his wild, exciting stories, tossing money around like a millionaire. But more important, tossing around all the answers to their dreams, all the right words that they wanted to hear.
He was so detailed in his lies—that was what was mind-boggling to her. He even had a photo album with pictures of his “mansion” in Las Vegas and the mansion down the street from his that he’d supposedly bought for Candace Walters. He would play on the heartstrings of women . . . crying, in a manly sort of way, over his beloved mother’s death and vowing to fight to win his little girl back from her “evil stripper” mother. He chose victims the same way that a farmer selects fruit off a tree—picking the ripe ones, the ones ready to fall.
Bachmeyer hadn’t had as much personal contact with Neal as Tingle—she was handling other aspects of the case, such as talking to his ex-wives and family members—but what she did have was more than enough. He immediately struck her as someone with an almost desperate need to be liked, whether it was by the guards, the police investigators, or even the prosecutors who were trying to kill him. But she felt his demeanor toward her went beyond friendliness to flirting, testing to see how Bachmeyer, an attractive blonde, would respond.
“Hi, Miss Bachmeyer,” he’d say when he saw her, smiling and twisting his head to make eye contact if she didn’t look him right in the eye. “Don’t you look nice today,” he’d add, no matter how conservatively she dressed. If he heard she’d been on vacation or had a few days off, he’d want to know how it went.
Maybe it was just paranoia, knowing how he operated on women. She wasn’t his type anyway—she was happily married, and too self-confident, too successful, too aware of what he was doing. To her, he came off as the sleazy guy at the bar, the one with all the pickup lines.
Neal would be the one who knew them all.
Bachmeyer thought that the full version of the video would give the judges a more complete picture of Neal: his animation as he imitated how he’d raised the ax to dispatch his victims; his ability to control conversation; his constant attempts to manipulate the investigators with compliments, threats, and promises to divulge everything in exchange for things he wanted. She wanted the judges to understand how dangerous Neal really was—that the murdered women had been taken in by a real sociopath. “Better than Ted Bundy” was how he’d described himself.
The victims weren’t stupid, nor were they greedy. Sure they wanted their money back, but the extravagant amounts that he promised them only surfaced in the last few days as the lies that he’d been juggling began to fall. A look behind her at the packed courtroom was proof that they were good mothers, good friends, and very much loved.
Neal had been the picture of decorum in the courtroom. Polite. Pitiful. Contrite. Bachmeyer hoped that the tape would help the judges see him for what he really was . . . a ruthless predator. She pushed the play button.
On monitors around the courtroom, Neal suddenly appeared as he had looked a year earlier. Still in the orange jumpsuit, he had long hair and a dark goatee. The questions and answers jumped from the monitors like the script from a horror movie.
Q: Was it like an adrenaline rush?
A: No . . . The adrenaline rush would come when I would kill somebody, like being a Highlander.
This was different to me, all right? Because I cared about them.
Q: You like to take charge of the situation?
A: I’m a strong-willed person. . . . I mean, if somebody has to make a decision, let it be me, because right or wrong, I’m going to make it. I mean, somebody has got to be a leader.
I need prosecution. I need justice to be served because I’m representing three dead people . . . as well as a rape victim. I want justice to be served and the truth to be known so that people can get on with their lives.
I mean, you know, if I had told her I’m going to take you to the house, and I’m going to tie you down, and I’m going to rape you, and you’re going to witness a murder, she’s not going to go. . . . I’m not being sarcastic with you at all, Jose.
I was good at covering things or putting so much shit out, pardon the French, that everybody that thought they knew me ain’t even stinking close. They don’t even know the first color of my hair.
You get in trouble and you go to God. Well, that’s sometimes the only time that He’s able to get through your thick skull, all right?
My mother killed me, OK, period. . . . If my mother was alive right now, she would be there for me in a heartbeat. Now, she would not pat me on the back. She wouldn’t dance and kick her heels. She would not say, “You did the right thing, killing those people.” . . . It would have probably killed her. But she would have still stood with me.
Rebecca was the most gentle, loving, sweetest person you ever knew. . . . I was never mean to Rebecca, never hurt Rebecca, never beat on her.
I’m great at business, whether you want to believe it or not
—
marketing, sales, you know, bullshit, con. . . . People are greedy, so I use that.
If somebody is angry, they don’t care. They just hate you so much or want to get a piece of your ass, right, they’re going to walk blind. That’s why you shouldn’t ever make a decision in anger, right, because chances are you’re making the wrong one. You’ve got to be cool; you’ve got to be calm; you’ve got to be thoughtful.
Q: Do you hate women?
A: Not that I am aware of. I mean, it’s not in my conscious mind. A psychiatrist might say deep down I hate women.
This is a warning: Don’t fuck with me, all right? Don’t open your fat mouth, OK? You better keep yourself quiet or you’re going to die, all right?
I felt bitter in a way, but . . . I didn’t use bitterness with that ax in my hand splitting her brain to execute her, right?
I’m not here just for a piece of ass. I’m here for somebody to love me and love somebody else, one on one.
I raped a woman. . . . If Suzanne was the only crime I ever did in my life, I would hope you would execute me for it. That’s how I feel about rape, OK?
It’s not like I had a woody raising the ax up and killing them, all right? I executed them. I wanted them to go as quickly as possible. It was not a sexual turn-on for me to kill somebody. I was not thinking of sex in any way when I murdered Rebecca, Angie, or Candace. It had nothing to do with saying, “Look, bitch, for all you other ones cheating on me in the past. . . .”
Q: Why did you choose a maul?
A: It had weight to it; I knew it would be enough to kill. . . . I believe, even though I haven’t yet experienced lethal injection, it was a lot more compassionate and fair to kill them like that. Even though it didn’t look real pretty, it was instant, OK? Meaning,
boom,
dead. And if they weren’t dead and just throbbing, so to speak, they sure as hell weren’t thinking about the pain.
Damn right I pitchforked that cat, all right? . . . I went in there and was going to pet the cat because I like animals, I always have. I pet them. I went over to pet him, and this cat just tore into me. And my temper when I was young . . . I grabbed this fork, and I just pitchforked this thing. . . . I mean, it’s like they put animals to sleep for biting somebody. I mean, what’s the difference? It attacked me; I defended myself; I killed it
—
simple as that.
I had a dog that bit me one time, and I killed him, too. And then I had a puppy that bit me that I killed. It was mean. It was just like something was wrong with him. I punched his brain in . . . just,
boom.”
You got to remember one thing: even a good liar makes mistakes and forgets things.
I was trying to spare Rebecca the nightmare that her financial world might be coming to a close. . . . She was greedy; she wanted to retire from the phone company. . . . She was going to be buried. She was going to be a slave. And, you know, I grieve over that.
Q: Why did you urinate on Candace Walters?
A: It was, like I said, the ultimate humiliation. . . . It was like, you know, “Lady, you’re gone. My life is gone. Rebecca. Angie. Careful where you dig.” . . . It was like an Oriental martial arts thing or an Indian thing. I mean, I hope somebody pisses on me when I’m gone, all right?
If I can murder something I love, what am I going to do to some bastard that I don’t love or have any respect for? I’m going to tear him up. Then you’re going to know what torture is.
I don’t believe Ted Bundy deserved to die . . . or even me. But justice is justice. The difference between them and me was that I was judge, jury, and executioner all in one, OK? . . . But I gave fair warning.
I’m more agitated right now than I was then. . . . It was like a normal, relaxed state. I wasn’t angry to where I said like, “Fucking bitch,
boom!”
I didn’t want to put a gun to their heads or a shotgun to the back of their heads and blow their heads off, I mean, because of the neighbors, you know. And then I [would have] had to kill the next-door neighbor and the painter and . . . It’s like if the neighbor would have come over, I’d have killed the next-door neighbor. I would have just gone ahead and went on a real killing spree. I mean, you guys would have had to pump a bunch of lead in me, all right?
Q: What about your claims that you were a bounty hunter and a hit man?
A: It was all just an act, playing a part. Bundy put it in a good way, not that he was an idol, but there was certain things that he did that were close to me. He said that the more you practice it, you were like an actor, an illusion, that you sold somebody that you were somebody that you weren’t. That the more he practiced lying or acting the role, the better he got and the more natural he became. . . . I related with Bundy in a lot of ways. Not because he was a mentor with me, I was better than Bundy would have ever been, OK? I’m not meaning that bragging, but I’ve had this killer in me all my life, and I’ve depressed it.
I don’t believe that I believe my own bullshit. That’s why I had an argument with mental health. They kept saying, “Do you hear voices?” No. Nobody told me to do it. I’m just a stinking liar, OK?
Like it says in Revelation, Revelation 6:8, about this pale horse, and on it was a rider, and his name was Death, and Hades followed him. That’s me, OK?